What did Donald Trump do today?

He spammed the federal government.

Today, government employees across a wide range of agencies—including some that are not in any way part of the executive branch—received an e-mail from hr@opm.gov. It read:

SUBJECT: What did you do last week?

Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.

Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.

The e-mail apparently came at the behest of Trump's financial backer Elon Musk, to whom he has delegated an apparently unlimited suite of presidential powers. Musk tweeted about them shortly before workers started getting them, and threatened (in the tweet) that any employee that failed to respond would be deemed to have resigned.

Resignations don't work that way, but as Josh Marshall reported tonight, even Trump's own agencies are specifically instructing their employees to ignore the message. These include the Defense Department, the FBI, the State Department, the Veterans' Administration, and the Department of the Navy. Labor unions were recommending the same.

It's not clear what Musk hoped to accomplish. All federal employees (except Musk himself) already report to supervisors. Many who received the e-mail are on paid leave, as the "efficiency" office Musk is notionally in charge of seems to have no clear idea of who it can actually get fired and what portions of the government it can or should shut down. Others—for example, postal workers—have jobs where giving an explanation like "delivered the mail" seems ridiculous. 

Musk has tried to portray himself as an omniscient micromanager before. After buying Twitter, he famously demanded, to the amusement of people who knew anything about software, that its engineers screenshot the code they had worked on over the past six months and send it to him—a process a little like asking auto mechanics to make an oil painting of each part of a transmission to prove that they'd replaced it. 

Even so, it's not clear who this was meant to impress. Musk is even less popular these days than Trump, while Trump himself often seems to find out what Musk is doing only when reporters ask him about it. 

Musk himself is a federal employee. During the week ending Saturday, he:

• waved a chainsaw on stage at a political convention

• dodged desperate public attempts by two of the mothers of his children begging him to get in touch on urgent matters related to the children he'd fathered

• gave a slurred, stumbling interview that convinced many who watched it that he was once again abusing drugs

• successfully dodged the question of on exactly what authority he was doing anything in government, and

• deployed his own private employees to from his rocket company to "learn" about the inner workings of the agency that regulates it.

Why does this matter?

• Wasting workers' time like this isn't exactly a stirring example of "government efficiency."

• Presidents are responsible for the actions of entire executive branch, even if they don't seem to know what's happening in it or why.